Related papers: Optimal Inflationary Potentials
Current observations indicate that an inverse exponential form of the inflaton potential provides an excellent description of single-field inflation. This potential fits the SPA$+$BK$+$DESI data sets well with in the $1\sigma$ bound in the…
Attempts to connect string theory with astrophysical observation are hampered by a jargon barrier, where an intimidating profusion of orientifolds, Kahler potentials, etc. dissuades cosmologists from attempting to work out the astrophysical…
The increasingly stringent observational bounds on primordial gravitational waves strongly constrain inflationary model building, favoring scenarios that predict highly suppressed tensor perturbations. While many viable constructions rely…
Cosmic Inflation provides an attractive framework for understanding the early universe and the cosmic microwave background. It can readily involve energies close to the scale at which Quantum Gravity effects become important. General…
In most current models of inflation based on a weakly self-coupled scalar matter field minimally coupled to gravity, the period of inflation lasts so long that, at the beginning of the inflationary period, the physical wavelengths of…
Based on the conventional metric tensor and driven by a nearly constant energy density, cosmic inflation, characterized by a remarkably accelerated expansion, was proposed as an early epoch in the Universe. The energy density is typically…
A brief review of inflation is presented. After having demonstrated the generality of the inflationary mechanism, the emphasize is put on its simplest realization, namely the single field slow-roll inflationary scenario. Then, it is shown…
I examine the status of inflationary cosmology in light of the first-year data from the WMAP satellite, focusing on the simplest models of inflation: those driven by a single scalar field. The WMAP observation of the Cosmic Microwave…
The most important criteria for a successful inflation are to explain the observed temperature anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation, and exiting inflation in a vacuum where it can excite the Standard Model quarks and…
We present new single field inflationary scenarios that produce the critical abundance of primordial black holes as dark matter reconstructing the inflaton potential from an input power spectrum. The method is exact in the slow roll…
In the primordial universe, fields with mass much larger than the mass-scale of the event-horizon (such as the Hubble parameter in inflation) exist ubiquitously, and can be excited from time to time and oscillate quickly around their…
I present a pedagogical review of inflation and the cosmic microwave background. I describe how a short period of accelerated expansion can replace the special initial conditions of the standard big bang model. I also describe the…
For simple inflationary models, we provide a consistent and complete scheme by which the macro-physical details of early universe inflation may be determined explicitly from the underlying micro-physical theory. We examine inflationary…
Motivated by the prospect of testing inflation from precision cosmic microwave background observations, we present analytic results for scalar and tensor perturbations in single-field inflation models based on the application of uniform…
We study the possibility that inflation is driven by a scalar field together with a vector field minimally coupled to gravity. By assuming an effective potential that incorporates both fields into the action, we explore two distinct…
If the inflaton potential has multiple minima, as may be expected in, e.g., the string theory "landscape", inflation predicts a probability distribution for the cosmological parameters describing spatial curvature (Omega_tot), dark energy…
Inflation has been the driving idea in cosmology for two decades and is a pillar of the New Cosmology. The inflationary paradigm has now passed its first round of significant tests, with two of its three basics predictions confirmed at…
We propose a class of scalar models that, once coupled to gravity, lead to cosmologies that smoothly and stably connect an inflationary quasi-de Sitter universe to a low, or even zero-curvature, maximally symmetric spacetime in the…
A mechanism of inflation from higher dimensions compactification is studied. An Early Universe capable of providing exponential growth for some dimensions and exponential contraction for others, giving therefore an explanation for the big…
We consider the spectrum of primordial fluctuations produced by inflationary models where the inflaton potential is the sum of two exponential terms. A wide range of spectra result, with the only constraint being that the scalar spectrum…